Large-scale data storage networks rely on continuous data protection (CDP) to automatically save a copy of every change made to the data. This allows the network to capture every version of the data that the user saves, thus providing the ability to restore data to any point in time in the event of hardware failure, system outages, and other significant disruptive events. CDP runs as a service that captures changes to data to a separate storage location and can provide fine granularities of restorable data objects (e.g., files, documents, directories, etc.).
Traditional recovery and restore methods in current data storage systems only restore data from the time a backup was made, whereas CDP uses no backup schedules and eliminates the need to specify the point in time to recover from until ready to restore. When data is written to disk, it is also asynchronously written to a second storage location. Though this eliminates the need for scheduled backups, it does introduce some overhead to disk write operations. Continuous data protection also requires high storage bandwidth. There are several ways to implement CDP, such as creating a journal and moving the old data to an undo log on every write, or creating a log structure of the data and managing the meta data. These methods require more bandwidth to the storage drives and more data movement compared to standard writes. CDP also increases CPU utilization. Managing the metadata for the any point in time data structures and moving large amounts of data requires significant amount of processing (CPU) overhead. A single storage array managing hundreds of drives will typically require significant amounts of CPU bandwidth for performing continuous data protection.
What is needed, therefore, is a data storage method that allows for use of advanced memory devices to improve storage media performance in large-scale data processing systems.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions. EMC, Networker, Data Domain, and Data Domain Restorer are trademarks of Dell EMC Corporation.